


History Makes Demands (Of You and Of Me)

by Her_Madjesty



Category: Anastasia - Flaherty/Ahrens/McNally
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Anya Wants, Assassination Attempt(s), Awkward Dates, Emotional Baggage, F/M, Family History, Gleb Wants, Longing, Sexual/Emotional Tension, Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-17
Updated: 2017-10-17
Packaged: 2019-01-18 14:15:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12389739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Her_Madjesty/pseuds/Her_Madjesty
Summary: Gleb Vaganov aims the barrel of his gun at the French Ambassador’s forehead and pretends that his hand isn’t shaking.





	History Makes Demands (Of You and Of Me)

**Author's Note:**

> Believe me, this "a new fic every day" thing is not going to last. I'm tired. My vacation's ending soon. Life resumes.
> 
> That said, I hope you enjoy this new, strange piece. It is, perhaps, the strangest possible way to get two reincarnated characters out on a dinner date. Don't date your would-be assassin, kids. Not even if he can sing.
> 
> Additional disclaimer: I know so little about modern Russian world politics. Please forgive me.
> 
> Hope you like it. XOXO

Gleb Vaganov aims the barrel of his gun at the French Ambassador’s forehead and pretends that his hand isn’t shaking. She stares back at him, each of her breaths an abomination. Steady. Measured.

“Why are you doing this?” she asks, and yes, why indeed, when he can’t even make her voice quiver, too distracted by the shivering of his body as it threatens to fall apart.

“My country demands it,” he tells her. “My history demands it!”

He doesn’t know why she’s here without her body guards, tucked away in the Russian State Library; doesn’t know where her men have run off to, can’t even fathom why she’s here at all when she could be safe in the French Embassy. Still, he feels the press of the room key in his breast pocket. There is a silencer on his gun. She came alone, and it was a mistake.

Silence blooms.

He doesn’t shoot.

The ambassador – Anya, or so the newspapers read (and it’s a strong, Russian name; oh, why is she here?) - reveals so much with her bright blue eyes, and yet, Gleb fails to read them.

His gaze drops. His arm falls down to his side. In the guilt that swarms him, he misses the parting of Anya’s lips, the shock in her quiet sigh.

She reaches out. Gleb retreats. He leaves the door to her room open behind him; the librarians who know him stare after him, confused, but he waves their political concern away. He slips into Moscow’s evening, instead, and walks until his feet can’t carry him any further. The Moskva welcomes him. He sits on her banks and dismantles his pistol until his hands are frozen and he can’t put the gun back together again.

It’s not the French, he knows, that his handlers are angry with, but it’s the French they’d pointed him towards. A glorified assassin killing for the remnants of the Bolsheviks; wound the French, they’d said, and it’d be almost as good as killing an American. Better still to wipe out that trail of old blood: Romanov, even if that wasn’t her last name anymore. It was a family line that needed burying, and Gleb was their man.

Great grandson of the Romanov killer. And here he sits. A failure.

(It’d been her face – he’d seen her in newsprint and thought himself prepared, but seeing her – no. The familiarity of her rendered him useless, in person; he’d fallen into blue and known the beat of her pulse, the sweat of her skin. He prides himself as a man unturned by even the most beautiful face, and it wasn’t beauty that froze him, just – her. He hadn’t managed.)

She’d disarmed him.

A week later, and there are apologies, a smearing, and hiding. Gleb stalks the streets in front of his apartment, desperate for a job, not looking at the paper.

He checks his P.O. box. The metal reflects back his face, blocked out by a single invitation. Gleb sniffs it before he slides a finger beneath its lip. It smells of lemons; a perfect cover for the threat of ricin, but the pull of summer is too strong. He doesn’t care.

The card stock he pulls from the envelope is fine and imprinted with the French seal. The ink of the note has smeared in one corner, as if its writer had written hastily.

_The White Rabbit. Tuesday. Dinner?_

There is no signature.

Gleb can’t stop the invitation’s fall to the floor.

He storms home, note stuffed into his jacket and riding on a wave of rage. How dare she? How _dare_ this little traitor seek him out when he’s committed no crime, no more than letting her live? How dare this Russian hiding behind the French pretend that she and he are of the same quality; that she can walk Moscow’s streets with his familiarity, woo his derelict sensibilities?

He keeps a lighter next to a box of cigarettes in the bathroom, and he retrieves it without a thought. It takes no effort to march onto his balcony, and even less to flick a fire to life.

An edge of the invitation sputters black. Gleb Vaganov, great grandson of the Romanov killer, doesn’t – shouldn’t – hesitates -

Falters.

Stops.

The flame dies. His body sags, exhausted, as he tucks the lighter away.

In his apartment, he keeps few things: a cardboard box doubling as a table, a pair of second hand shoes, and journals. His grandfather’s journals. He’s come to memorize the handwriting of Gleb Vaganov the First, deputy commissioner of the Bolshevik regime. The tone of the journals is formal, each word carefully chosen, though there is a year that is...strange. One entry, in particular, written on a cold December evening, sticks in Gleb’s mind as he fiddles with his invitation, ash settling on his fingers.

 _I dreamed of her again_.

This “her” never receives a name, and the mention comes long before the man had met Gleb’s grandmother. He remembers, as a child, pressing his nose to that lone page, chasing a scent in the spatterings of ink that surrounded the phrase. Time and cold couldn’t kill the hint of lemon, a touch of summer lost in a past he cannot reach.

Gleb steps back into his apartment. He leaves the cold behind him and tucks the invitation away in between his grandfather’s pages.

Sleep, that night, doesn’t come.

Tuesday does.

Evening leaves the streets of Moscow bleeding orange and red. Gleb wears black and walks to Smolenskaya Square, quiet and wincing against the gleam. His pistol rests against the small of his back; the silencer once again on. It hurts his neck to stare up sixteen floors to the windows of the Level Jewelry building, but he does, and he lets himself seethe. A fire flairs to life in his chest; he curses the furs and the rings on the parading patrons as he walks through the door. He ignores a waiting footman ready to take his coat and makes his way to the elevator alone. Staring across the lobby before the doors slide close, he steadies himself. Breathes.

The elevator clicks. The air leaves his lungs.

It’s a slow climb up to the top.

By the time the doors open, Gleb’s body sings for lack of proper breath. He steps into a room bathed in golden light and blinks. The world feels – quiet.

The White Rabbit is awash in color and odd pictures: politicians with rabbits’ heads, hares dressed in waistcoats. It’s easy to stare, and Gleb nearly doesn’t hear the host asking him for his name.

“I’m looking for the – Anya.” Gleb coughs and forces some sense into his head. Her name leaves his tongue stiff in its wake, but it comes more naturally than, say, “the French ambassador. She invited me, even though I tried to kill her last week.”

The host nods, forever pleasant. “Right this way, if you’d please.”

Gleb follows, dazed. The fire in his chest does not permit itself to be smothered, but it cools with his child-like wonder.

He pulls himself together by the time _she_ comes into view, stifles his enchantment and replaces it with practiced disdain. She’s no less elegant than she was in the library, though the cut of her clothes is as simple as his. The light through the window plays with the contours of her face, lets her lounge on the restaurant’s pillowed sofas in something akin to peace.

She smiles when she sees him.

Gleb almost stops walking.

The host leaves them, retreating back to his stand. Anya lets her menu fall to the wayside. Without a word, she motions to the seat across from her, and despite the rage still nestled in the mess of his belly, Gleb goes without complaint. He brushes sweaty palms against the fabric of his pants and spares another thought for her bodyguards. A wayward ward. That must be easy.

In his awkwardness, he lets the ambassador consider him. The calm of her gaze is practiced, even forced (and Gleb hand’s not on his gun, now; he manages to study back). Her lipstick’s pale. She wears no jewels. Her fingers thrum against the tablecloth, carefully slow, but each nail curves inward like a tiger’s claw.

Gleb’s heart settles in his throat, and _he doesn’t know why_.

The blank mask across from him falters into something like a genuine smile. “I didn’t think you’d come.”

“Why did you invite me?” And maybe it’s rude, but it’s either that or he starts stroking the silverware. He longs for something to hold on to and can’t subtly reach for his gun. “Do you lack a sense of self preservation? How do you know I won’t shoot you here and be done with it all?”

“I hope you’d at least try and make it through the meal.” Oh, good, she’s sarcastic. He watches her study the room with untapped arrogance, sniffing like it’s in style. “This wouldn’t be such a bad place to die.”

“Your Russian sounds French,” he snaps.

“Nationalist.”

“Better than a death wish.” He leans forward onto his elbows, can’t quite help himself. “Are you sure that you’re well?”

Anya’s smile turns wicked. “How kind of you to ask.”

“You know that’s not what I meant.”

“No, I suppose it’s not.” Anya waves, and a woman in an apron approaches their table. Gleb tries to catch the order Anya murmurs into the girl’s ear, but the light catches on the hollow of her elegant collarbone, and he becomes...distracted.

By the time he hauls his gaze upward, the girl is gone, and Anya’s staring.

“Why am I here?” he asks.

Blue eyes pin him, and he’s in the elevator all over again. It’s a fight just to take a breath.

Yet Anya’s confidence falters, and he glimpses – fear? no, never fear, not from Anya (and where is he going, thinking he can claim that?). A flickering. A wonderment. A question.

“You seemed familiar,” she murmurs, gaze dropping to the tablecloth.

Their waitress passes the table and leaves them a bottle of wine: Fantom Cabernet Sauvignon. Anya seizes the whole of it and wrestles off the cork. Gleb watches, horrified and awed. It takes him too long to realize he should help her, and by then, the cork is gone. Anya fills her glass all the way to the brim, then reaches out, offers the bottle to him. When he declines, she flags their waitress down again.

“A glass of water for my friend, if you would.”

She folds her napkin across her lap, then presses her lips against her glass.

Gleb knows that he’s staring again, he just – can’t seem to stop. “I just don’t understand,” he says into the silence. “Do you even have a clue who I am?”

Some of the amusement in Anya’s eyes sputters. Her glass returns to the table with a heavy thud.

Gleb’s water arrives.

“I have an idea,” Anya says (and Gleb winces; it doesn’t suit her, the way her voice goes cold). He watches the beating of her pulse in her wrist, no longer able to look her in the face. “Why don’t you tell me, though?”

He should lie.

He doesn’t.

“My name is Gleb Vaganov. Technically the second. My grandfather was the first.”

He misses the way Anya’s eyes narrow. Her nails pick up their beat on the table; it is impatience, and Gleb feels his leg start to shake in matching time.

The waitress reappears. Gleb glances towards his menu, still off to one side. Anya schools her expression back to blankness and covers for him as he reaches for it.

“Just the hare, for now, and the rabbit pate. We’ll request entrées in a little while, thank you.”

The tag of it catches him, forces Gleb to lift his gaze. Anya looks back to him and arches an eyebrow in return. “Can I help you.”

Gleb sputters. Sighs. “You’re – kind.”

The mask shutters, and Gleb discovers that it’s not the cold he fears, but the rage. “Did you not expect me to be?” Anya asks, voice sweet. “Well, I suppose that’s not a surprise. These familial habits do run deep.”

Anger drives him out from behind the shield of his menu. “You talk of family,” he sneers. “Your family smothered this country!” 

“As did your party,” she snarls. Her hands grip the tablecloth and send wrinkles to his side. Her cheeks have gone red with anger and sunlight.

Gleb notices but doesn’t stop. “We are trying to fix things,” he says, nearly rising from his seat.

“And that’s what killing me would’ve done?”

“You are the last strain of an era we never managed to bury.” The belief of it tumbles from him, steals some of his anger and leaves him heavy. Gleb readjusts in his seat and runs a hand through his disheveled hair. “Revolution is supposed to be simple,” he tells the great granddaughter of a tsar. “With you, things are...complicated.”

Anya’s rage is unabated, but she sits back, lets him have his space. “Revolution is not kind to those who live through it,” she tells him. “Not to those who are inevitably crushed beneath.”

“You have no room to talk, Romanov.”

The hare arrives, as does the rabbit. Anya focuses on the food, and Gleb can breathe again, no longer drowning in the swells of raging blue. The hare is paired with artichokes and a bed of thinly shaved truffle. He recognizes it too quickly and hates himself for it, hates himself more as he watches Anya’s lips close around her fork. She doesn’t look at him as she pushes the rabbit appetizer towards him: pate with sweet jam, apple and medeira.

He should reject on principle, if nothing else.

His stomach growls.

Anya smiles.

Gleb reaches out, takes his fork, and bites down.

It’s delicious. He’s unsurprised. And bitter.

“I know you hate this,” Anya says, still not looking at him. “I knew you would, but I wanted you to come here.”

“Why?” He sounds almost American, the way he drags out the word. “Is this the way you take your revenge?”

“Oh, never.” The daintiness with which she wipes her mouth screams of fraud, now that he sees her properly. Ambassador she may be, but there’s something feral beneath her skin.

They are wolves. She is scenting.

The waitress arrives again, patience in her eyes. Anya tucks the wolf away and is kind to her. She orders too quickly for Gleb to parse, but soon his menu is gone, as is the girl, and Anya’s hidden herself away again.

“That was rude,” he says.

The ambassador shrugs. She looks, then, towards the bar, where a bearded man stands fussing over a skillet that’s on fire.

“I knew it was unlikely that you’d been here,” Anya says, as though speaking from a distance. “Even possible that you’d never heard of it.”

“We don’t all have disposable incomes like yours.”

“All the same.” She sips her wine. “The head chef here prides himself on cuisine that’s historically Russian. He and his father got in quite a tiff over it when he was first starting out – to modernize the old was blasphemy, a sin. Yet the food, he claims, remains Russian at heart, no matter what shape it takes.”

She fills her fork with hare and artichoke, hesitates, then offers it to him.

Gleb stares.

“I didn’t bring you here to argue politics.” Anya’s fork remains between them. “I’ve no intention of changing your mind. But I know you, somehow, and that’s something I’d like to pursue.”

“I tried to kill you,” Gleb repeats. His voice quivers.

Anya shrugs again. “You’re not the first.”

Silence blossoms. The sun kisses the horizon. Gleb watches as Anya blinks, momentarily blinded.

He hides behind the sunspots in her eyes and takes his bite.

When Anya smiles at him again, there is no ambassador, no gun, no politics between them. He’s gutted. His heart stutters.

Gleb smiles back.

It’s foolish, the way he behaves through the rest of the meal. The waitress brings him borscht, warm and familiar, stuttered with baked beans, fried crucians, and sour cream. Then comes a palette cleanser (pretentious) and Anya’s laughter; she tells him about a sister who’s backpacking through the Swiss mountains, and he tells her the cleaner bits of his last week in Samara over bubbles of companionable silence.

They play at normalcy, at friendship, and then Anya divides up a plate of boar cutlets, and he passes her soaked mushrooms, and there’s happiness sparking on the tip of his tongue that overpowers every other taste.

The familiarity of it teases him, touching the back of his brain. Gleb plays with the last of his boar and clings. He hears, in the chattering room, his grandfather, rasping, “I dreamt of her, vnuk. I always dream of her.”

Anya polishes off her second glass of wine and hands an empty plate to their loyal waitress.

“Do you want dessert?” she asks him. The strength of her shakes him. “I’m always keen on sweet things.”

“That’s France.” Gleb clucks his tongue, but it’s meaningless, and it makes her laugh. “Yes, I’d – I’d like that.”

The waitress leaves and returns with a menu that Anya then positions between them. Her fingers dance inches away from Gleb’s; tiger nails, smooth skin. He has ash burned into his skin, but still, he wants to reach out, see what’ll happen; if he’ll stain her. If she’ll stain him.

“This,” he says, pointing without looking. Anya smirks at him and folds up the menu, then passes it along when the waitress returns.

Silence resumes as they wait, their faces lit by dim table lights and little else. The sun has set over Moscow. Gleb looks out the broad windows and traces the skyline in his mind, bumps the buildings, tastes the cold.

He doesn’t think before reaching out. The window glass pulls his skin in close until he’s pressing his palm against it. He flushes against it, against the brush of Anya’s gaze across his cheek.

“My grandfather,” he begins, pulling his hand away, “left journals. Detailed things, listing every material, every good that aided himself and his comrades.”

Anya lets him speaks. It’s a tentative thing.

“He never mentions you, though. Well, not you,” and Gleb flushes again, “but – Anastasia.”

“My grandmother.”

“Yes. I know he chased her; my father talked about it. Called it his one great failure.” The laugh that leaves him hurts. “He had nothing with him that spoke of a trip to Paris. I always wondered what happened.”

Their scant hours have made him familiar with the weight of Anya’s gaze. He looks up at her through his lashes to find her considering him.

“My grandmother spoke about him,” she says, her voice soft. “She told me a story, once. She was young, still in St. Petersburg, and winter was coming in. She was sleeping under a bridge – that’s the part of the story they don’t tell, you know? But she woke in the middle of the night to find an officer standing over her, shrugging out of his coat.”

Gleb watches Anya’s eyes go distant. “He tried to give it to her, but she refused. Went to hide in the palace. She told me that and always followed it with the story of your grandfather letting her go.”

Gleb feels the message of it, deep in her tone, and turns his gaze to the window again.

“She never knew why,” Anya continues. Gleb starts as her foot brushes his own. “It’s a story, I think, that’ll never be told.”

She bleeds warmth; he can feel her, even through his shoes. Gleb holds his breath, then stretches out so he can touch her again.

Anya doesn’t look at him, then – she smolders.

“What happens after this?” The words leave him, breathless. “What are we – where is this going? Just dessert and then goodnight?”

Anya chuckles like it’s raining and there’s water in her lungs. Her hand curls around her remaining knife, and she pauses. Gleb glances at her out of the corner of his eye and sees her studying her reflection.

His gun presses hard against his back.

Their waitress arrives.

Two plates come down between them. One is lush: mandarin honey cake and sour cream ice cream, covered in edible flowers and smelling of life. The other comes on a scuffed wooden board. It holds three skewers. Each pierces a rectangular cut of ungarnished honey cake.

“The chef’s grandmother’s,” the waitress explains, fingers glancing over the skewers, “and his interpretation.” She leaves them with that, taking only a moment to slide the receipt onto Anya’s lap.

Gleb considers his pride, then pretends he hasn’t seen it.

The conversation stalls, though it feels a necessary thing. Anya spoons some of the ice cream into her mouth and immediately shoves the dish over to Gleb’s side of the table. “Try it,” she insists, mouth still partially full. “You need to try it now.”

Gleb laughs and does as he’s told.

(He doesn’t see how Anya freezes.)

The new cake tastes like summer, bursting with softness and sweet mulling with sour. They eat it too quickly, child-like. Anya licks the ice cream from her lips without apology. Gleb stares at the redness of her tongue, and she doesn’t let him look away.

The skewers they address more slowly. Anya presents Gleb with his and ignores his petty sigh. She is in every inch royalty. For a heartbeat, Gleb’s practicality orders him to turn away from her. The fire in his chest has not dampened. He delays on his own bite as she takes hers. Chains seems to grow tight around his chest.

Then, he tastes.

Honey springs up summer in his mouth, and he clings to it and its moment. His vision goes double; Anya and Anastasia sit before him and smile. An ambassador. A street sweeper. A Grand Duchess he’s failed to kill.

Gleb closes his eyes.

“It’s good, isn’t it?”

Gleb swallows and feels his fire dwindle to a warmth. “It tastes like a memory,” he says, all too quiet.

He doesn’t move to stop Anya from paying, once the cake’s all gone. Shame starts to gather in his thoughts, but he stomps on it, promises it a night full of reminiscing if it just gives him this moment. If Anya notices the somber turn of his mouth, she has the grace not to call him on it.

Anya’s credit card is returned. The ambassador rises from her seat, stretches, and shins in the dull light of the restaurant. The pulse of her gleams. Gleb finds himself beside her and makes himself her shadow, catching the scraps she offers of her light. They walk in unison towards the elevator.

“So tell me,” Anya asks him, once they’ve stepped inside. “Was the chance you took worth it?”

Gleb looks down, considers her.

The elevator doors slide shut.

*

She leaves the country, after that. He only hears through the newspaper and the gossip of his comrades, the lot of the nuisances chattering behind his back. Gleb takes a day for himself and walks along the Moskva, neck bent as he stares into the water.

If he tries, he can remember his grandfather: dark, strong, a man who never compromised, or so it had seemed. His father had always told him, “Glebka, you have his eyes! A fitting transfer of the best of the Vaganov genes.”

His reflection ripples, then pulls away.

He checks his P.O. box, head low as he does. Inside, there’s an envelope, no return address, just his name. It’s sealed with spit and tape, and he tucks it inside his jacket, an exercise in patience.

He only opens it on his balcony, the wind’s chill in his face.

The note is unsigned.

 _If you’re ever in Paris, you know how to find me. Consider leaving your gun at home_.

Gleb tucks the note with its partner inside his grandfather’s journals.

*

(It takes him two months, a few fights, and a new passport, but when he’s ready to go, Gleb goes.)

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know what you thought!


End file.
